Thursday, April 30, 2015

Contrary to what many believe, the UN 1947 partition plan did not set the legal groundwork for the creation of the state of Israel. Rather, Eugene Kontorovich explains, Israel was created “despite the UN.” Kontorovich also discusses the potential impact of future UN resolutions. (Interview by Yishai Fleisher; audio, 25 minutes).

The head of the United Nations European Headquarters in Geneva has initiated a review of its concession arrangement with the bookstore operating next to the Human Rights Council in response to allegations over book displays that deliberately target Jews and Israel.
The world body announced the action in response to a March 26th protest by UN Watch, a non-governmental human rights monitoring group in Geneva, over the bookstore’s display of a series of books such as “How I Stopped Being a Jew,” which accuses the Jewish religion of being “genocidal.” The controversy was reported in a major Israeli newspaper article.
“We welcome this prompt action by the United Nations, which is founded on the principles of equality and tolerance,” said UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer.“At a time when Jews across Europe are being targeted by violent attacks and incitement, it is deeply distressing that the UN Headquarters in Europe would promote books on ‘how to stop being a Jew.’ It’s impossible to miss that no other books in the shop target or even criticize any other religious or ethnic group,” he added.

It’s official: there will be another Messi arriving on the planet very soon.

Lionel Messi confirmed he will become a father for the second time after the Barcelona star uploaded a picture of his pregnant girlfriend, Antonella Roccuzzo, onto Instagram on Thursday to confirm the news.

In the photo, the 27-year-old’s son young Thiago was seen kissing Roccuzzo’s stomach alongside the words ‘Waiting for you baby! We love you’.

The news comes after rumours began spreading that Messi was expecting another child and, in particular, a second son following a report in Argentine outlet Clarin.

The publication claimed the boy will be called Benjamin and could be born at the end of the year.

Algeria's Echorouk sports site noticed immediately that Benjamin is also the name of the prime minister of Israel!

Its headline is "Messi chose a Jewish name for his new son."

In case you don't get the point, the story is illustrated with this photo of Messi visiting the Kotel a couple of years ago, right next to rabbi who looks particularly Jewy.

Bend the Arc PAC will back progressive candidates by making direct contributions to their campaign committees. It will focus on issues such as income inequality, marriage equality, social justice and immigration reform.

Alex Soros explained that

There’s an opportunity to launch something that actually speaks to what the American Jewish community cares the most about and to show the narrative of what the real American Jewish experience is.

But what’s the point of creating yet another ‘progressive’ PAC? Why specifically target Jews when there is no specifically Jewish issue that it is concerned with? The answer lies in what it is not concerned with:

Hadar Susskind, who has previously worked for other Jewish organizations including J Street, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, will serve as director of Bend the Arc PAC…

“We don’t touch any foreign policy stuff,” he said. “One of the reasons behind doing this is that [the other Jewish groups] aren’t really representing the views of the American Jewish community…” [my emphasis]

Does that sound familiar? It’s J Street without Israel! This PAC will undoubtedly fund the very same candidates that the J Street PAC does. But J Street has been losing its appeal, as the Obama Administration’s anti-Israel policies have begun to make even some ‘progressive’ Jews uncomfortable.

Since Roosevelt’s presidency, American Jews have leaned left because of their concern about social issues, as exemplified by the civil rights movement. Reform Jews have even been criticized for acting as though Judaism was synonymous with liberal politics. Most, however, strongly supported Israel — and so did most Democratic politicians. With the advent of Obama, that is no longer the case, and liberal Jews are caught in the middle.

Soros has come along with a brilliant solution to their dilemma: be progressive, but don’t think about Israel.

Bend the Arc will be able to funnel Jewish contributions to the left-wing politicians that support and will continue the administration’s policies, including its anti-Israel ones. But because it won’t “touch any foreign policy stuff” none of those hard questions about Hamas and Iran need come up. Jewish progressives will be able to donate to it with the clearest of consciences, with warm and fuzzy feelings about gay marriage and immigrant rights, without any nagging doubts that perhaps they are betraying their people.

The traditionally liberal Jews who have been forced to choose between their progressive domestic agenda and their love for Israel will now have a home.

And it won’t be a lightning rod for criticism by Zionist Jews the way J Street was. Anyone who opposes Bend the Arc can be dismissed as a right-wing ideologue, or even a Republican.

Finally, it is a diversionary tactic. It will work to focus the Jewish community on domestic issues. The less any American, Jewish or otherwise, thinks about the radically anti-Israel and anti-American policies of the Obama wing of the Democratic Party, the better it will be for them.

I doubt that any of the Democratic presidential candidates — yes, I expect challenges to Hillary — will explicitly campaign on the foreign policy record of the Obama Administration (it’s too gruesome), but I do expect that at least one will embody the same philosophy of helping America’s enemies and hurting its friends.

And you can bet that that candidate will be the favorite of Bend the Arc.

Israel’s field hospital in earthquake-hit Nepal began operating Wednesday morning, with staff treating nearly 100 patients and delivering their first baby — a boy — on the first day, according to an IDF spokesperson
Among the patients were some 30 Israeli nationals. Most were suffering from dehydration and were soon released to their hotels.
Over 250 doctors and rescue personnel were part of an IDF delegation that landed Tuesday in the Nepalese capital, Kathmandu, in the wake of Saturday’s magnitude-7.8 earthquake that devastated large swaths of the mountainous country, killing at least 5,000 and leaving some 8,000 wounded and tens of thousands seeking shelter and food.The Israeli group set up the field hospital with 60 beds, including an obstetrics department, and was operating in coordination with the local army hospital.

Israel’s first Ethiopian doctor, who lit one of the traditional torches on Yom Ha’Atzmaut give years ago, is leading the IDF medical team in Nepal.Dr. Avi Yitzchak made Aliyah in the early 1990s in the Operation Shlomo airlift and has become a symbol of success for the Ethiopian community.
He arrived in Nepal five days ago, when he said there was absolutely nothing in the realm of first aid, and decided where to set up a field hospital, which went into operation immediately.
“We began accepting patients from the Nepalese army hospital that was not able to function well, especially in the field of surgery,” said Yitzchak, who specialized in surgery when he studied medicine at Soroka Hospital at Ben Gurion University.“We are receiving citizens of Nepal with medical problems that the Nepalese army hospital cannot treat beaus they accept only soldiers and their families,” Dr. Yitzchak said from Katmandu.When not in the army, Dr. Yitzhak works as a surgeon at Soroka.

To Whom It May Concern,If I hear one more time on Facebook, Twitter, et al that Israel’s field hospital in Nepal is somehow connected to the conflict with the Palestinians, I’m going to permanently block the person saying so on the grounds that they’re stupid.
Here’s the thing: Israel is an entire country, with all the complicated impulses and competing agendas of any human society. It is perfectly capable of being involved in two completely different things at once, of being angelic in one arena and terrible in another, just like every other country. The IDF doesn’t go to Nepal to avoid the Palestinian issue. It goes because Israelis have honed emergency medicine into an art form, and because the IDF has never quite shed its founding culture of adventurousness, and, above all, because there are people out there who desperately need help.
Those who see in every good news from Israel “hasbara” (propaganda) are missing the single most important fact you can know about Israel — that it isn’t a political campaign begging for your vote. It is a nation. With two million schoolchildren, dozens of cities, its own cinema scene and a language spoken nowhere else in the world. It doesn’t go away if it loses some imaginary popularity contest. And as with any human society, it offers an endless stream of failures and successes that will let you “prove” any narrative you want. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

Abbas told a group of Egyptian journalists in Cairo late Wednesday that Ban contacted Israel on his behalf.

Abbas said Ban was told Israel "agreed to the return of those refugees to Gaza and the West Bank, but on condition that each refugee ... sign a statement that he doesn't have the right of return (to Israel)."

"So we rejected that and said it's better they die in Syria than give up their right of return," Abbas told the group.

Abbas said this in Arabic, without any shame. Because his audience knows that the real purpose of the "right to return" is to destroy the Jewish state, and has nothing to do with "Palestinian rights."

Since the Yarmouk crisis escalated in recent weeks with ISIS taking over part of the camp, the Arab world and the media have shone a small spotlight on the area where so many Palestinian Arabs have been living. But they won't say anything about how Abbas had the chance to save them, and probably still can.

The Action Group for Palestinians in Syria is an offshoot of the Palestinian Return Centre. The major NGO dedicated to helping Palestinians subscrines to the same twisted, sickening philosophy that Mahmoud Abbas does - they only want to save them if they remain useful pawns to destroy Israel.

We have heard nothing negative about this outrageous statement by Mahmoud Abbas from Amnesty International, Oxfam or Human Rights Watch. In fact, those groups purposefully misinterpret international law to justify Abbas' contention that there is a legal "right to return" for Palestinians - and their own antipathy towards Israel ensure that they will not disagree with Abbas' perverted morality that it is better for Palestinians to die than to give up a "right" that is literally nonexistent and that was created for the sole purpose of destroying Israel. (UN resolution 194 deliberately does not call it a "right" and the UN itself interpreted the resolution far more narrowly than Israel haters do today.)

It is scandalous that Mahmoud Abbas has not been called out for his despicable words that sealed the death sentence for thousands. And the silence from "human rights" organizations speaks volumes about their real desire to save lives when their pet Palestinians literally and explicitly prefer to see their people die.

[T]he audit found indications that in Gaza a considerable number of civil servants were receiving salaries, partly funded by Pegase DFS, because they were eligible for support by virtue of being on the PA payroll but who were not going to work due to the political situation in Gaza (see paragraph 6). Out of 10 Gaza beneficiaries selected by the audit for interviews, three stated that they were not working, while one was absent. The audit also found that the State Audit and Administra-tive Control Bureau was obliged, in accordance with PA regulations, to pay salaries for its 90 staff members in Gaza, all of whom are unable to work. These findings are consistent with estimates based on data from interviews provided in a 2010 evaluation of Pegase contracted by the Commission which indicated that 22% and 24 % respectively of the staff employed by the PA Ministries of Health and Education in Gaza were not working at the time.

A European diplomat said the European Union informed the Palestinian Authority in a recent communication that Europe would not be able to continue financial support for the salaries of staff in the Gaza Strip while they aren't actually working. The diplomat, who preferred not to be named, told a local Arab newspaper that "it has become extremely difficult for the EU to continue to justify contributing to the payment of staff salaries in the Gaza Strip in the absence of a solution to this issue as these employees did not attend to their work since 2007".

The diplomat said, "The objective of direct financial assistance provided by the European Union to the Palestinian Authority is to enable them to provide basic services to citizens and enable them to continue their performance...In the absence of the ability to achieve this we have said to the Palestinian Authority that the European Union will not be able to provide open support to pay Palestinian Authority salaries to those who are not enrolled in their jobs."

"We can not defend to our parliaments the payment of salaries to employees who are not working."

The diplomat said that the return of thousands of employees in Gaza to their jobs in the education and health sectors could be done very quickly, especially in light of the urgent need in Gaza for employees in these fields. The solution to this issue must come quickly, he said.

Why did it take 16 months for the EU to even have this conversation with the PA?

It is interesting that even after the latest pretense of unity between Hamas and Fatah, the Fatah workers in Gaza are still not doing their jobs even in health and education. This shows yet again that Hamas cares far less about Gazans than it does about its own political desires.

Now that police beatings are in the headlines again, it is fashionable for so-called progressives to equate the police with Israeli soldiers - as if Israeli police and soldiers are the quintessential example of police brutality.

David Simon, the creator of The Wire, has again weighed in on unrest in his adopted city of Baltimore, turning his frustration from the protesters to the “army of occupation” of the city’s police.

“They were collecting bodies, treating corner folk and citizens alike as an Israeli patrol would treat Gaza, or as the Afrikaners would have treated Soweto back in the day. They’re an army of occupation. And once it’s that, then everybody’s the enemy.

I will bet anything that the lowest private in the IDF in Gaza last summer would act with more restraint towards those trying to kill him than David Simon would. I would also bet that the same private knows more about international law and the laws of armed conflict in protecting civilians than David Simon does.

To use Israel as the standard of brutality is not only an obscene slander, but it shows how successful anti-Israel propaganda is, and how open and susceptible otherwise intelligent people are to being manipulated by the haters.

Even more absurd is that the standard for treating Gazan civilians like subhumans comes not from Israel - but from those Israel was fighting..

This AFP report from yesterday will get about 1/10th of one percent of the coverage that stories about Israel do:

Police in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip beat and arrested protesters on Wednesday at a youth rally in the north of the besieged coastal territory, an AFP correspondent said.

More than 400 demonstrators gathered in Shujaiyeh, a neighborhood in eastern Gaza City that was razed during a July-August war between Hamas and Israel, urging reconstruction and calling for an end to intra-Palestinian division.

This undated video shows how much restraint Hamas shows towards civilians in Gaza.

It is not easy to find videos like this on YouTube in English. And coverage of daily Hamas brutality is minuscule compared to the much exaggerated, out of context and often fictional stories of Israeli law enforcement brutality.

Meanwhile, videos showing Israeli police helping Arabs - videos that completely destroy the lazy assumptions that journalists and writers like Simon make - are even more rare: This is not a coincidence. Journalists are lazy in accepting the fiction of widespread Israeli brutality, and anything that shows that to be false is naturally going to be buried because it is too hard to explain the reality to readers compared to reporting-by-meme.

This video shows an army patrol reviving an Arab in Hebron whose heart stopped after he was electrocuted.

Clearly, these soldiers are frantically trying to save the life of someone that David Simon thinks they passionately loathe.

People like Simon are well meaning - and are literally clueless that they are being brainwashed every day by an army of anti-Israel activists and a complicit media that discards even the appearance of objectivity while willing to accept and repeat the narrative of hate without question.

But when David Simon writes his own analysis for the public, he has the same responsibility as any journalist to get his facts right. His being exposed to lies for decades is not an excuse to skip fact-checking.

The irony is that much of the audience for these lazy reporters want to know the truth, even if Simon doesn't. There is a reason that the most popular video I've ever uploaded, with 400,000 views, shows IDF soldiers acting kindly towards Arab children.

(h/t Alexi, Ian)

UPDATE: Simon changed the text in his original article from Gaza to the West Bank. I suppose I could link to more videos of Israeli patrols playing soccer with Palestinian youths, but clearly he stands by his account of how Israel treats Arabs like dirt, and that turns him from someone who one could assume was duped by the media into someone who is doing the duping.

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Al-Monitor reports:
It all began as a personal project by a young Israeli Arab who lives in northern Israel. He wanted to use social networking to convince other Israeli Arabs that the Israel Defense Forces are not some “army of evil” and that its soldiers are not as bloodthirsty as they tend to be portrayed in Arab propaganda films. He soon learned, however, that in the digital age, there is no end to surprises. Instead of messages and responses from the Israeli Arab audience he was targeting, he began receiving messages of peace and love from young Arab men and women from across the Arab world.

M. is an Israeli Arab Muslim who served in the IDF. He spoke to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. Last year, he came across a series of billboards sponsored by the Balad Party as part of its campaign against the recruitment of Israeli Arabs into the IDF. He decided to fight back. “I saw the signs that were hung in Arab villages, and I kept track of the Facebook campaign being run by activists of Balad and the other Arab parties under the name ‘TZaHaL ma bistahal’ ['The IDF isn’t worth it']. It infuriated me,” he said.

“Activists would show up in the main square of Shfaram with bits of rubble, as if the rubble were from Gaza. They carried big signs too, as if they were trying to say, ‘Look what the army that is calling on you to enlist is actually doing in the Gaza Strip.’ Some of the activists would even paint their faces red, as if they were injured, while they tried to relay their message of ‘Don’t enlist!’ to young Bedouin, Druze, Christians and Muslims. I decided to respond to them on Facebook, so I made a page called ‘TZaHaL bistahal’ ['The IDF is worth it'], but instead of getting responses from the young Arabs to whom I was directing my personal campaign, I started to get photos and texts from young people around the Arab world. My jaw dropped.”

The photos and video clips sent from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan and other countries can be found on the Facebook page "BeTzaHaL" ("In the IDF"), and there are lots of them. One young woman from Saudi Arabia filmed a green Saudi passport. Her voice plays in the background, against a street scene in Jeddah, with a message for the people of Israel: “Good evening. I am a young woman from Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. I am a member of one of the better-known tribes of the Hijaz, and I am showing you Darajeh Square, a famous landmark in Jeddah. I’d like to send a message of peace and love to Israel and its dear citizens. I know it is surprising that a Saudi Arabian citizen sends a message to the people of Israel, but it is a basic principle of democracy that everyone is free to voice an opinion. I hope the Arabs will be sensible like me and recognize the fact that Israel also has rights to the lands of Palestine.”

A young man from Iraq shot a picture of his passport along the Tigris River. “I want to send a message of peace and love to the dear Israeli people,” he says. “I decided to shoot this video and tell you, ‘True, we are two countries that do not have friendly relations, but that doesn’t matter. I believe that the number of people who support Israel here will grow consistently.’”

Other young people send M. photos of their passports with handwritten messages in Hebrew, Arabic and English. It is always the same: “We love Israel.” One Egyptian police officer took it a step further by including his police cap along with his passport in the shot and wrote in Arabic, “We love, love, love Israel and its army.” He even added a picture of a heart with a Star of David in the middle of it.

M. said that the whole thing began with a young Coptic woman from Egypt who emigrated to the United States, where she experienced racism and manifestations of hatred toward Copts. “I quickly learned that she also speaks Hebrew, like many young people who studied Hebrew at Cairo University,” he said. “So I said to her, ‘Why don’t you do a little something to spread the message, so that people in other countries will see and hear that there are other voices in the Middle East?’ She sent a photo of her passport, and pretty soon I started getting pictures of passports from all across the Arab world. The very next photo came from Iraq.”

M. also engages the senders in private conversations, which are not posted publicly. “After I got the video from Baghdad, I asked the person who sent me the clip what it was that caused him to express support for Israel. He responded, ‘You’d be surprised. I’m not the only one. There are a lot of young people here who think like me. Everything that is happening to us here in Iraq — the killings, the terrorism, the veritable bloodbath — showed us that Israel has nothing to do with it. There are many young people living in Iraq today who have no religion. They are fed up with the religious wars between Sunnis and Shiites and want to live their lives without religion.”

M. says that he has also been receiving messages from a young student in Jordan. A member of a prominent clan, she claims to have many senior army officers in her family. What impresses her most about Israel is its liberalism. “I was amazed to learn that they have gay pride parades and that single-sex marriages [performed abroad] are accepted there,” she confided to M. “She told me that although she realized that her sexual orientation is different, in a traditional society she cannot come out as a lesbian, especially since she is a member of a prestigious clan. All she can do is be envious of the fact that in Israel, just a few dozen miles from the Jordanian border, a whole different life is possible.”

Over the past year, M. continued to receive a daily stream of messages from young Arabs, shedding light on yet another aspect of the dramatic changes underway in the Arab world. Yes, there are wars, revolutions and a return to traditional religions. There are bloody struggles between Shiites and Sunnis and the Islamic State has risen. At the same time, however, many young people long for another reality, even if perhaps it cannot be implemented in their own countries. Syria and Iraq have been torn apart, Yemen is fighting the rise of the Houthis and in Egypt, young people continue to dream of how liberalism and democracy might one day beat back religious zealotry.

It is certainly possible that the phenomenon encountered by M. during his private protest is a fringe one, but in an era of open skies and open Internet, no leader, not even a dictator, can block borders once they have been breached.

Representatives of bereaved family members and Israeli soldiers who fought in the Battle of Jenin in 2002 are outraged that police were called over the tent they set up to protest the film, which they say defames Israeli soldiers.
Last Wednesday, on Israel's Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terrorism, the protest tent was erected outside Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein's office to protest his decision not to open judicial proceedings against Israeli Arab filmmaker Mohammad Bakri for his film "Jenin Jenin" and its portrayal of Israeli soldiers.In many Israelis' eyes, the film constitutes libel against Israeli soldiers by portraying the battle, in which 23 Israeli soldiers and 52 Palestinians were killed, as a wide-scale massacre of Palestinian civilians, a claim refuted by the U.N., as well as Human Rights Watch and other nongovernmental organizations. Weinstein, upholding the decision made by his two predecessors, said in December 2014 he had not been presented with "extraordinary claims not known before."
Representatives for the soldiers who fought in the battle have appealed to the president, prime minister, Knesset speaker, defense minister, Israel Defense Forces chief and attorney general to overturn the decision.Attorney Israel Caspi, who fought in the Jenin battle and is representing the bereaved families and the soldiers, told Israel Hayom, "Police came to us and questioned us under the pretense that there had been a disturbance, which is a lie."

In 1975, the great violinist Yehuda Menuhin refused to participate in a Unesco event in Paris after the agency passed an anti-Israel resolution. From Germany, even leftist writer, the famous Heinrich Böll, denounced Unesco for its stance on Israel.
That should be the behaviour of cultural personalities today, those who believe in truth and fairness, as well: they should stop working with Unesco unless it withdraws its anti-Semitic resolutions, while academicians from around the world should express their support for the Israeli archeologists working in Jerusalem.
The measures taken by Unesco against Israel, in addition to being intolerable, are grotesque. The cultural cancellation of Israel justifies its physical annihilation. It is a process of extermination already used by the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, which led to the death of million of Jews.
Unesco is a United Nations body that has the task to defend education, science and culture. What is happening is a perversion and a reversal of its role.
I will personally refuse to cooperate with this body until it eliminates its intolerable anti-Semitic spirit. This entails not accepting their invitations and refusing to report on their good initiatives. Brave and free people should do the same.Israel can win this battle only with the support of the Westerners who still care about the fate of their civilization.

The president of the International Committee of the Red Cross attacked his organization’s World War II record, saying it “lost its moral compass.”
Peter Maurer, presenting the keynote address Tuesday at a Geneva commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi death camps, said the ICRC “failed to protect civilians and, most notably, the Jews persecuted and murdered by the Nazi regime.” Maurer said his group “failed as a humanitarian organization because it lost its moral compass.”
The commemoration event, jointly sponsored by the ICRC and World Jewish Congress, was attended by 200 senior members of Geneva’s diplomatic corps. It featured a panel discussion with Deborah Lipstadt, an Emory University Jewish history and Holocaust studies professor, and James Orbinski, the former international president of Doctors Without Borders, according to a WJC news release.
During World War II, the ICRC, headquartered in Geneva, was the principal humanitarian institution maintaining communications with both the Allied and Axis powers. While the ICRC provided assistance and protection to Allied prisoners of war held by Nazi Germany, it did not do the same for Jewish deportees because the Nazis refused all humanitarian requests to help Jewish victims. At the same time, the ICRC did not publicly denounce the deportation of Jews to concentration camps.

Here we see the army of screaming Muslim women following a group of peaceful Jews strolling on their holiest spot.

It is as pure a view of antisemitism as one can imagine, and the Muslims are very proud of them.

Only after the Jews exit the holy spot do they start singing. (I really want them to adapt a "Yibaneh Hamikdash" tune to "Allahu Akbar" and start dancing every time they hear the chants outside the Mount gates.)

Mr. Hassan, 28, often regales his clients with feats of logic and analysis involving history, science, current events, politics, and various social issues, always adducing evidence to buttress his thesis that Jews control world affairs, but only in an evil way. The unmarried father of two typically holds forth for about fifteen customers per day at the Saara Salon, whose name involves a play on words that uses a Semitic root that means both "hair" and "storm," the latter a tribute to the sensibilities of Dearborn automotive hero Henry Ford and his dedication to exploring alleged Jewish conspiracies as often featured in the publication Der Stürmer.

"Malik is a master," says coworker Ayaan Faridi, 26. "Within three minutes of hearing about the earthquake in Nepal, he'd already put together the pieces and come up with a persuasive line of reasoning as to how the Jews caused the disaster, and how they stand to profit from it. I couldn't do his argument justice, but his basic point was that you can't trust those Jews."

Ms. Faridi recalled an earlier instance, several months ago, in which Hassan linked Jews to Bubonic plague, autism, chemtrails, and pollution from hydrofracking, doing so with a fluidity and facility that astounded her. "He was pulling information from I don't know where, but he had every last one of us convinced," she recounted, to nods from the other hairdressers.

Accusing Jews of nefarious conspiracies is nothing new. Hassan's uniqueness lies in his original application of them to everyday developments in a way that compellingly explains how there is no need to engage in self-examination or improve oneself, since all evil comes from the monstrous, all-encompassing Jewish conspiracy, says social scholar David Duke.

"Any cultured person will have encountered the eminently reasonable notion that the Jews orchestrated 9/11, faked the Holocaust, arranged for Kennedy and Lincoln to be assassinated, what have you. I think where Mr. Hassan excels is the smoothness with which he weaves his narrative, bringing in even the most innocent-sounding facts and showing how, in actuality, they point ever more convincingly to a comprehensive, worldwide, eternal Jewish plot to enslave the rest of humanity."

Hassan recently began to outdo himself, noted Duke, in showing how Jews were responsible for events that until now were thought to precede the advent of Jews entirely. "I heard him last week, and he blew my mind. I'd never before considered how Jews might be to blame for the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs; for the decline of the Egyptian Old Kingdom (2686-2181 BCE); and the mysterious cataclysmic event that violently tore a huge chunk off the Earth in its early period in order to form what became the moon."

Even more impressive, said a frequent client at the salon who declined to be named lest the Jews get to her, Hassan can even demonstrate how Jews can reach into fiction and folklore to manipulate events. "He just told me how there's no way to explain the Death Star's destruction of Alderaan unless the Jews were ultimately behind it," she said, still stunned.

Israel’s aid team to the earthquake-battered Himalayan nation of Nepal is the largest in manpower of any international aid mission.Over 250 doctors and rescue personnel were part of an IDF delegation that landed Tuesday in the Nepalese capital, Kathmandu, in the wake of Saturday’s magnitude-7.8 earthquake that devastated large swaths of the mountainous country, killing at least 5,000 and leaving some 8,000 wounded and tens of thousands seeking shelter and food.The Israeli group set up a field hospital with 60 beds that began operations on Wednesday in coordination with the local army hospital.
Nepal’s Prime Minister Sushil Koirala and the Nepalese Army’s chief of staff visited the field hospital to attend its opening ceremony.

After a series of delays, the Israel Defense Forces field hospital in Kathmandu will start treating thousands of those injured in the weekend’s devastating earthquake Wednesday morning, kicking off Israel’s largest ever effort of its kind.
The hospital’s opening will come a day after Israeli teams began search and rescue operations, though they did not find any survivors.
An IDF spokesperson said the hospital, located next to the Nepali military hospital, will be operational by 8:30 a.m. local time and treat some of the thousands of injured Nepalis hurt in the 7.8 magnitude quake, which claimed the lives of over 5,000 as of Tuesday afternoon.Nepalese officials expect the death toll to climb to as high as 10,000. Around 8,000 people have been injured while the United Nations estimated that eight million people had been affected.
The Israeli hospital and crew only landed in Kathmandu Tuesday morning, after a series of strong aftershocks delayed the flight by a day, and soldiers immediately began setting up, said Col. Yoram Laredo, who is heading up the army’s relief effort.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is an Antisemitic forgery describing how Jews allegedly plan to subjugate the world under Jewish rule. It was published in Russia in 1903 and translated into multiple languages. In 1921, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was exposed as a false document. Palestinian Media Watch has documented that Palestinians present The Protocols as a true manifestation of Jews' and Israelis' aspirations for the future.
PA TV also recently served as a platform for demonizing statements by a Gazan university professor. In an interview, Dr. Ibrahim Abrash, political science professor at the Al-Azhar University, explained that Judaism is based on extremism and that it permits stealing from and killing Gentiles:

Fatah official speaks about "Protocols of Elders of Zion" as true Jewish document

Fatah Spokesperson Osama al-Qawasmi:‎ "According to Israel's ideology, strategy ‎and policy from 1956 until now, Gaza is outside the Israeli ideological thinking. Even in ‎their Protocols [of the Elders of Zion] and even in their Bible [it says]: 'Don't live in ‎Gaza.'" [Official PA TV, April 5, 2015‎]

It sounds ridiculous to claim that the Jewish Quarter had an "Arab character" after only 19 years, but isn't it equally ludicrous to characterize all of Jerusalem outside the Green Line as "Arab East Jerusalem"? Yet that is what is routinely written today.

Jews were a majority in Jerusalem since the 1860s. Since 1900, Jerusalem's Old City and its neighborhoods/villages in the east, north and south have been under 18 years of Ottoman rule, 30 years of British rule, 19 years of Jordanian Arab rule and 47 years under the rule of the Jewish state. For some reason, the 19 years of illegal Jordanian occupation is considered the status quo, the anomalous 19 years that makes the entire area supposedly "Arab."

But it isn't. Jerusalem has never been an important city to Arabs or Muslims except during times that it was controlled by Jews or Christians. Jews didn't only live in the Jewish Quarter, but they lived throughout the city as well as in supposedly "Arab" neighborhoods like Silwan - a Biblical village later settled by Jews who called it Kfar HaShiloach.

Map depicting the MV Maersk Tigris’ original path toward the UAE and diversion after being intercepted by the IRGCN. (Source: marinetraffic.com)

The best roundup of what happened yesterday in the Persian Gulf comes from the (Asia/Pacific) Diplomat site:

The shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz have long been highlighted as a potential flashpoint amid the simmering geopolitical tensions between the United States and Iran. Its waters are of particular geostrategic significance given that over a third of the world’s petroleum traded by sea passes through the region. Iran has repeatedly emphasized its dominance over the waters, threatening to blockade the strait in a time of crisis. Today, we saw an acute manifestation of Iran’s audacity when the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN) seized and escorted the Marshall Islands-flagged MV Maersk Tigris, a shipping vessel belonging to Denmark’s A.P. Moller–Maersk Group and chartered by Singapore-based Rickmers Shipmanagement, toward the Iranian port at Bandar Abbas. The incident sparked a response by U.S. Naval Forces Central Command (NAVCENT), which ordered the USS Farragut, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer that was 60 miles from the point of the Tigris’ interception, to respond to the vessel’s distress signal.

Saudi Arabia-backed, UAE-based Al Arabiya was among the first sources to break the news in English. It reported that Iran had fired warning shots (true) and seized a U.S.-flagged vessel (false). Nevertheless, the initial reports sparked considerable online panic at the prospect that the United States and Iran could be headed for a major confrontation. The report also noted that the crew of the ship numbered 34 and were American. Needless to say, U.S. citizens being held against their will by Iran hits a raw nerve for the United States given certain historical events. We’ve since learned, thanks to Reuters, that the Tigris’ has a crew of 24, most of whom hail “from Eastern Europe and Asia.” In the process of the seizure, the IRGCN fired across the bow of the ship. Pentagon spokesman Colonel Steve Warren told CNN that “the master was contacted and directed to proceed further into Iranian territorial waters. He declined and one of the IRGCN craft fired shots across the bridge of the Maersk Tigris.”

In the wake of the Tigris incident, CNN learned that a U.S.-flagged ship had been intercepted by the IRGCN – on Friday, April 24, four whole days before the Tigris incident. Reportedly, the U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet issued a notice to commercial ships to exercise caution in the Persian Gulf and the Hormuz Strait following the incident.

The Marshall Islands isn’t normally a country whose name you’ll read at the center of a major international incident, but the fact that the Tigris was flagged with the country’s flag complicated the situation. After gaining independence from the United States in 1986, the Marshall Islands enjoys pseudo-protectorate status under the United States’ security umbrella. As per the Compact of Free Association governing the relationship between the United States and the Marshall Islands, the United States “has full authority and responsibility for security and defense matters in or relating to the Republic of the Marshall Islands.” The U.S. Defense Department’s lawyers have determined, however, that for the purposes of the Tigris‘ capture by the IRGCN, the U.S. has no obligation to respond or come to the defense of the Marshall Islands-flagged vessel. (Eli Lake and Josh Rogin have more on the Marshall Islands angle over at Bloomberg View.)

.@CBSDavidMartin "Pentagon lawyers have determined..US has no obligation to come to the defense of a Marshall Islands-flagged vessel at sea"
— Major Garrett (@MajorCBS) April 28, 2015

There is a flip side to the US agreement to defend the Marshall Islands - it is that the Marshall Islands cannot defend itself. As a State Department factsheet explains,

The United States has full authority and responsibility for security and defense of the Marshall Islands, and the Government of the Marshall Islands is obligated to refrain from taking actions that would be incompatible with these security and defense responsibilities.

By relying on the US for its defense, it means that if attacked, the tiny country has no alternative means of defense.

Which means that when the Defense Department lawyers say that the Tigris does not fall under that agreement, the Marshall Islands has no recourse. On the contrary - the US would probably act to stop any move by the Marshall Islands to confront Iran militarily.

The symbolism cannot be lost on Israel and the Gulf countries who have been told for decades that the US will defend them against aggression. Here, the US has openly and swiftly signaled that in today's world, such defense is much more rhetoric than reality.

This is all besides the more general promise by the US to keep the shipping lanes to the Gulf open for all that seems to have been significantly weakened..

US allies are being told that they cannot rely on the US anymore and that any assertions to the contrary are just words. America will make noises, for sure - the USS Farragut is just that - but the US message to its allies is much louder than the message that the destroyer is supposedly making to Iran.

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

I reported last week that Hamas had won student elections in Birzeit University, which had generally been pro-Fatah in recent years despite a strong Hamas presence.

The PA apparently didn't think much about this show of student democracy, because Arabic media is reporting today that the PA arrested 12 Hamas supporters both at Birzeit as well as at Hebron Polytechnic University.

The reports say that the police broke into students houses to arrest them, damaging their contents.

Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. Jew-hatred is not a result of the existence of Israel or of anything Israel does. The cause and result go the other way round. Israel is hated because Jews are hated.
We are not talking about the religion of Judaism. Strange to say, it’s very rare to hear even the most rabid anti-Semite attack the Jewish religion. (We ourselves do, in a rational way, because we attack religion as such, but we are not anti-Semites.) We are talking about hatred of the Jews as a people.The root of anti-Semitism is, however, in religion.
For two thousand years Christianity (though not all Christians) held the Jews to be bad. Not their religion, which Christianity came round to adopting as the pre-history of the god-man, but the nation, the people, who were dispersed from their own land and scattered among other nations when their general mutiny against Roman rule failed. They were cast in the role of handy scapegoats for every ill that afflicted the peoples they lived among.
With the rise of Islam, the Jews who lived in the lands that Muslims conquered were maltreated for a different badness: they, like the Christians, would not accept the “truth” of Muhammad’s religion, so must suffer the consequences of their obstinacy and pay to stay alive, or die. When, in 1948, the Jews in their recovered homeland mustered an army which actually defeated six invading Arab armies, the Arabs felt deeply humiliated. Something had gone very wrong. Allah simply could not allow such a thing to happen. Islam had conquered that once-Jewish territory centuries earlier, and no one else was allowed to own it.

Given the spectacularly larger number of refugees and deaths caused by the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan, why does no one ever question the legitimacy of Pakistan's existence?
This question is particularly valid given another fact: Never before in history was there a Pakistan. It was a completely new nation. Moreover, its creation was made possible solely because of Muslim invasion. It was Muslims who invaded India, and killed about 60 million Hindus during the thousand-year Muslim rule of India. The area now known as Pakistan was Hindu until the Muslims invaded it in A.D. 711.
On the other and, modern Israel is the third Jewish state in the geographic area known as Palestine. The first was destroyed in 586 B.C., the second in A.D. 70. And there was never a non-Jewish sovereign state in Palestine.So, given all these facts, why is Israel's legitimacy challenged, while the legitimacy of Pakistan, a state that had never before existed and whose creation resulted in the largest mass migration in recorded history, is never challenged?
The answer is so obvious that only those who graduated from college, and especially from graduate school, need to be told: Israel is the one Jewish state in the world. So, while there are 49 Muslim-majority countries and 22 Arab states, much of the world questions or outright only rejects the right of the one Jewish state, the size of New Jersey, to exist.
If you are a member of the Presbyterian Church, send these facts to the leaders of the Presbyterian Church USA who voted to boycott Israel. If you are a student in Middle Eastern Studies -- or for that matter, almost any other humanities department -- and your professor is anti-Israel, ask your professor why Pakistan is legitimate and Israel isn't.They won't have a good answer. Their opposition to Israel isn't based on moral considerations.

The controversy surrounding The Lancet, a British medical journal edited by Richard Horton, and its central role in targeting Israel continues to be an important and evolving issue. Last July, during the war with Hamas, The Lancet published an egregious “Open Letter for the People of Gaza.” As detailed by NGO Monitor, The Lancet has a history of exploiting health for anti-Israel advocacy, and two of the primary authors of the “Open Letter” – Drs. Paola Manduca and Swee Ang Chai – promoted an antisemitic video made by American white supremacist David Duke. As a result, Horton and his allies have sought to defend themselves and to vilify their critics.
The main critics consist of over 700 medical professionals under the framework of the Concerned Academics Group, who sent a detailed complaint to the publisher, Reed Elsevier. Led by Professor Sir Mark Pepys of University College London, they called on the publisher to retract the letter, issue an apology, and ensure that “any future malpractice at The Lancet is prevented.”
In response, a counter group, Hands off The Lancet, launched a media campaign to vilify Pepys and Horton’s other critics. This self-serving group includes two authors of the “Open Letter,” -- Sir Ian Chalmers and Dr. Mads Gilbert. They have previously been linked to promoting antisemitic rhetoric and expressing support for the September 11 terrorist attacks, respectively.

Wits’ SRC president, Mcebo Dlamini caused controversy this weekend after he posted a Facebook status regarding whites and the state of Israel: “I love Adolf Hitler”. Following his Facebook comments, he told Wits Vuvuzela that he admired the German leader, who sent millions to death camps, for his “charisma” and “organisational skills”.

Responding to a commenter who wrote “Hitler new [sic] they were up to no good”, Dlamini replied “I love Adolf HITLER”.

When contacted about his comments on Hitler, Dlamini restated his admiration of the fascist leader of Nazi Germany.

“What I love about Hitler is his charisma and his capabilities to organise people. We need more leaders of such cailbre. I love Adolf Hitler,” Dlamini told Wits Vuvuzela.

As the leader of Germany, Hitler is generally blamed for triggering World War II and sending over 6-million Jews to death camps as well as Roma, communists and homosexuals.

“I have researched about president Adolf Hitler. I have read books about president Adolf Hitler. I have watched documentaries about president Adolf Hitler,” Dlamini told Wits Vuvuzela defending his knowledge of the former German dictator.

In the same comment thread, Dlamini wrote that every white person has “an element of Adolf Hitler”.

“I have had numerous encounters with white chaps. From primary till today I live with white chaps … As I said, they are not Hitler but there is an elements of him in all of them. I connected the dots,” Dlamini said.

Dlamini is not the sharpest tool in the shed. His comments came in response to his own Facebook post comparing Israel and white people to Nazis.

December 1940.France had fallen six months earlier.The United States would stay wrapped in
isolationism for another year.The
British Empire stood alone against the Nazi barbarians.

In Jerusalem, the Very Reverend
Dr Norman Maclean (1869-1952) was fourteen months into his wartime appointment
as chaplain to St Andrew’s Church. The
son of a schoolmaster on the Isle of Skye, the elderly minister had enjoyed a
distinguished career. From 1915-37 he
had served the foremost congregation in Edinburgh – St Cuthbert’s – and in 1927
had been moderator of the Church of Scotland. He had preached in the United
States, in Australia, and, in 1930, at the League of Nations in Geneva. He was a king’s chaplain for Scotland, and
often preached before the Royal Family when they were in residence at Balmoral.

Much published, he had commenced
the foreword he had written to Leon Levison’s The Jew in History (1916) with a resounding assertion of
philosemitism: “The world owes its soul to the Jews”. He was also an ardent
supporter of Zionism, declaring that “the restoration of the Jews to Palestine”
comprised “the only lasting reparation that Christendom can make for centuries
of wrong” and that “it was a disgrace that the holy places of Christianity
should be in the hands of Mohammedans”.

Shortly after his arrival in
Jerusalem in 1939 he had delivered a sermon on the theme of Exodus 17, with the
Nazis depicted as the Amalekites who attacked the Israelites at Rephidim only to
be ultimately vanquished by Joshua.

Now, Maclean had been invited by
Gershon Agron, editor of the Palestine
Post (retitled the Jerusalem Post
in 1950) to write a Christmas message for inclusion in that paper. Gladly accepting, he warmed to the task. Attempting to raise morale at so dark and
desperate a juncture in human affairs, he entitled the message “Sursum Corda”
(“Lift up Your Hearts”).

Determined to gesture his deep
sympathy for Jewry, and mindful that Christmas coincided that year with Chanukah,
he was at pains to acknowledge Christianity’s debt to its parent religion,
referring in his message to the

“world of wonder and mystery, in
which the threads of life are so closely interwoven that were it not for the
Jewish festival there would never have been a Christian festival, for the one
is the child of the other”

However, that passage never made
it to Agron’s newspaper – it was cut by the Palestine Censor employed by the
British Mandatory government during the Second World War.

Dr Maclean also wrote:

“it is totalitarians today who
must be changed from instruments of torture and tyranny into men of goodwill
‘ere peace can come”

For some reason the Palestine
Censor disapproved of that eminently reasonable statement, and through that passage
too went his blue pencil.

The Censor also struck this out:

“the Angels did not proclaim
peace to gangsters, robbers, and mass murderers”

And this:

“Bethlehem will conquer
Berchtesgaden. In that great hope Christians and Jews can rejoice together. The
Jews no less than the Christians. For it is the Jews who have given the world a
universal religion. They gave the world the priceless gift of monotheism that through
Bethlehem has gone unto the ends of the earth. It is no exaggeration to say
that there is nobody in the world today for whom life is not different because
of Jerusalem or Bethlehem.”

You’ve guessed it. Blue-pencilled
as well.

In fact, by the time the Palestine Censor put down his pencil only thirty-nine
lines of Dr Maclean’s 100-line text remained. The good clergyman’s message had
been eviscerated – or, to express that another way, effectively de-judaised.

The following month, January, saw
Maclean and his wife preparing imminently to depart Jerusalem and return to
Scotland. Maclean had evidently been
declared persona non grata by the British authorities.

The pro-Jewish book he had begun
to write while sitting on a hilltop overlooking John the Baptist’s birthplace
would have to await its completion at home on his native Isle of Skye.

At the beginning of 1942 (see Jewish Chronicle,16 January 1942) Time
and Tide – a British literary and current affairs journal
of liberal inclination, founded in 1920 by Welsh feminist Viscountess Rhondda
(1883-1958) – broke the story of Maclean’s treatment at the Palestine Censor’s
hands..

The journal noted with
indignation that the Censor even reworked the translation from the Latin “Gloria
in excelsis Deo, et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis” in Maclean’s
message in order to discard the final three words, meaning “to men of
goodwill”.

Maintaining that the Censor’s
changes constituted a “British version of the Index Expurgatorius,” the journal
continued:

“If any underlying idea can be traced
in the Censor’s excisions, it seems to suppress the connection between
Christianity and Judaism. This connection is asserted by all the Christian
Churches, while the Nazis deny it by suppression and perversion of evidence. Is
Bethlehem not to conquer Berchtesgaden?”

Following Time and Tide’s
exposure of the story, a leading article in the Manchester Guardian – as
pro-Zionist then as its egregious lineal successor, the London-based Guardian,
is anti-Zionist – called for an explanation of the Censor’s
“eccentricities”. The article went on:

“There seems to be no reason for
the fantastic exercise except that the Palestine censorship must have wanted to
hide the origins of Christianity in the Jewish race and religion. But why? The
Colonial Office, which is the Ministry responsible to Parliament, should be
made to explain.”

As the relevant issue of Hansard shows, on 10 March 1942, in the
House of Lords, a Welsh peer and former Liberal MP, Baron Davies of Llandinam
(1880-1944), a wealthy colliery-owner who took a keen interest in international
affairs, fulminated against British policy towards the Jews in Palestine.

“….When
this article appeared, the Censor had got hold of it and out of 139 lines he
had struck out 100 lines. If your Lordships will read the article you will find
that there is not a single word about any political subject at all. It is
simply an endeavour to put the case from the standpoint of the Christians and from
the standpoint of the Jews. I cannot help feeling that it was not only an
affront to the Jews but an affront also to the Christians that this article
should be dealt with in the way that it was. I wonder whether the Censor has
been reprimanded. The whole thing has a Nazi smell about it, and I cannot help
feeling that it does show the extraordinary way in which our Administration
carries on affairs in Palestine.”

Furthermore:

“There is a second instance to
which I must draw the attention of the House, and which happened quite
recently. Dr Weizmann, who, as your Lordships are aware, is the head of the
Jewish Agency, sent a cable to Palestine on the occasion of a great recruiting
campaign, in order to encourage people there to join not Jewish regiments but
the British Army. He said: "My heartiest greetings to the Palestine
Auxiliary Territorial Service at the outset of its recruiting campaign. I know
how eagerly our women will welcome this opportunity to share with the ten
thousand of their men already serving in defence of their lives, homes and of
all that Palestine means to them. That was the message, but the Censor refused
to allow it to be published in the Jewish papers in Palestine. I cannot help
wondering how we can ever hope to win this war if this is the way in which we
treat our friends and their efforts to help us in fighting the enemy. It is a
stupid policy. It brings us into contempt with the Arabs, and it brings us into
disrepute with our friends".’

That same year, the book that Dr Norman Maclean had
embarked upon while in Jerusalem was published in London by Victor
Gollancz. Destined to go quickly into a
second edition and to be taken up by the American Zionist Emergency Council, it
was entitled His Terrible Swift Sword: On
the Problem of Jewish Immigration to Palestine.

Daphne Anson is an Australian who under her real name has authored and co-authored several books and many articles on historical topics including Jewish ones. She blogs under an alias in order to separate her professional identity from her blogging one.

The UN finally investigated the Palestinian storing of rockets in UNRWA schools and their use of the schools to launch rockets against Israel, all of which constitute grave violations of the Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law.
Key findings gleaned from the UN report:Hamas and/or Islamic Jihad stored rockets in UNRWA schools. The board found, in the case of the UNRWA Jabalia Elementary “C” and Ayyobiya Boys School, referring to the discovery of weapons there on 22 July 2014, that “it was highly likely that a Palestinian armed group might have used the premises to hide weapons.”
Hamas and/or Islamic Jihad stored rockets in schools that were in active use by children. During the war, former PLO lawyer Diana Buttu famously said on Al Jazeera that “the rockets that were found in the schools in UNRWA were schools that are not being used by anybody—school is out, I’ll have you know.” However, in the UNRWA Gaza Beach Elementary Co-educational “B” School, on 16 July 2014, the UN Board of Inquiry notes that the school gate was unlocked during the period leading up to the incident “in order to allow children access to the schoolyard.” School was out, but UNRWA was inviting the children back in to play.Hamas and/or Islamic Jihad fired rockets from UNRWA schools. In the Jabalia school listed above, the board found that “it was highly likely that an unidentified Palestinian armed group could have used the school premises to launch attacks on or around 14 July.” Similarly, concerning weaponry stored at the UNRWA Nuseirat Preparatory Co- educational “B” School, the UN inquiry found that “the premises could have been used for an unknown period of time by members of a Palestinian armed group” — and that “it was likely that such a group may have fired the mortar from within the premises of the school.”

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon charged that Palestinian militants had stored weapons in three UN facilities during last summer’s Gaza war and that such action was “unacceptable.”“I am dismayed that Palestinian militant groups would put United Nations schools at risk by using them to hide their arms,” Ban said on Monday as he released a summary of a Board of Inquiry probe into events that occurred in UN facilities in July and August.
“The three schools at which weaponry was found were empty at the time and were not being used as shelters,” Ban said. "However, the fact that they were used by those involved in the fighting to store their weaponry and, in two cases, probably to fire from is unacceptable.”
He also took Israel to task for shelling neutral UN facilities and killing or injuring Palestinians sought shelter there from the bombings that occurred during Operation Protective Edge.

Back in July, Brian wrote about how UNRWA, the “United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East,” discovered rockets stored in one of its schools in Gaza, and subsequently returned those rockets to Hamas.
With the publication of a UN report on the matter, UNRWA Spokesman Chris Gunness tweeted the following today:

Chris Gunness‏The UN Secretary General Board of Inquiry found no evidence that UNRWA handed rockets over to Hamas

There you have it, nothing to see here. Here’s the relevant section of the report, from the UN Watch website:57. The Board was informed that UNRWA had received testimony that two individuals identifying themselves as policemen had come to the school, alleged that they knew who was responsible for the cache of weapons and left a telephone number. Upon being contacted, one of these individuals stated that the weapons would be removed from the school in the early morning. The Board was further informed that, early in the morning of 17 July, the door to the classroom in question was found locked, with no signs of forced entry or exit, and that it was noted that the weapons had been removed.Oooooohhhhhhhhhhhh. So, according to the report, UNRWA found the rockets, contacted “local authorities,” i.e., Hamas, and asked them to remove the rockets. Instead of removing the rockets, the Hamas police provided a phone number, which they somehow just happened to have, for the unnamed individuals who had put the rockets there in the first place, whom they just happened to know. Those people were contacted — presumably, by UNRWA staff — and apparently came to the school and picked the rockets up. Lost property, happily reunited with its owner. Much better!In the warped mind of Chris Gunness, that counts as “no evidence that UNRWA handed rockets over to Hamas.”

French children's magazine Youpi published this in its latest edition. The translation is "We call these 197 countries state...

Hasbys!

Elder of Ziyon - حـكـيـم صـهـيـون

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